LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



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PRACTICAL PIETY 



FOUR DISCOURSES DELIVERED AT 



Central Music Hall, Chicago 



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JEiN'KIN LLOYD JONES' 



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CHICAGO 
CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY 

175 Dearborn Street 

1887 



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Copyright, 1887, 
By Charles H. Kerr & Co. 



These four sermons are dedicated to the unknown friends 
-whose generosity 7nade the Central Music Hall ineet- 
ings possible^ in the hope that the potency of their dol- 
lars may be increased by this extension of the preacher^ s 
words. 



CONTENTS 

The Economies of Religion, - - 5 

Bread versus Ideas, - - - - 15 

Present Sanctities, - - - - 31 

The Claims of The Children, - - 44 



THE ECONOMIES OF RELIGION. 



HE RAISETH UP THE POOR OUT OF THE DUST THAT HE 
MAY SET HIM WITH PRINCES. — PsallUS CXtii.^ /, 8. 

I honor the prudence that foresees the rainy day 
and anticipates the wants of old age. I would not 
have man less provident than the ant that does have 
a care for the non-productive winter. Before I be- 
gin to talk about the Economies of Religion, let me 
admit that there are some phases of religion that must 
be classed among the last luxuries of the wealthy; 
they are too costly for many, perhaps for most of you 
to indulge in. The religion of outward form is very 
expensive. It is a luxury that demands very good 
clothes, and a costly church to show them off in. 
Impressive architecture, beautiful interiors, artistic 
music, professionally rendered, are all desirable, but 
they are scarcely for those who are struggling to feed 
and train growing families. 

I believe in this material world and all the good it 
contains. I believe in creature comforts. I have 
never seen a house too elegant to be the home of 
man, the carpet too sumptuous to receive the foot oi 



6 THE ECONOMIES OF RELIGION. 

woman. I believe in silks and satins, when there are 
enough of them to go around; when they are not 
procured at the cost of higher interests and universal 
sympathies. I believe in no religion that advocates 
mendicancy. If Tennyson's northern farmer over- 
reaches the truth when he says, 

" Proputtj, proputty 's ivrything 'ere, an\ Sammy, I 'm 

blest 
If it is n' the saame oop \onder, fur them as 'as it 's the 

best," 

yet there is great truth in his statement that — 

'' Tis n' them as 'as munn}- as breaks into 'ouses an' steals. 
Them as 'as coats to their backs an' taakes their regular 

meals. 
Noa, but it's them as niver knawswheer a meal 's to be 'ad. 
Taake my word for it, Sammy, the poor in a loomp is bad." 

Poverty, though not the '^poor in a loomp," is bad. 
Poverty of every kind, material and spiritual, out- 
ward and inward, is to be deplored, and so far as 
lies within our power is to be avoided by all legiti- 
mate means. 

Having said so much, it is time to say that there is 
that in religion that nerves the laborer's arm and 
strengthens the toiler's hand. Religion will *' raise 
the poor from tlie dust.'' It enables him ^* to guide 
his affairs with discretion." Religion alone will 



THE ECONOMIES OF RELIGION. 7 

bring permanent relief from the much talked of but 
little understood ** hard times," which are always 
upon us. Let us look at the economic forces of relig- 
ion. 

I. Religion reduces our wants. — Vice is very ex- 
travagant. Sin is expensive. Passion never counts 
the cost. The selfish soul has towering needs. In 
proportion as one is deficient in character is he de- 
pendent upon externals for his position, and the ex- 
ternals are the things that cost money. It takes a 
great deal of money to get ^' into society." But a 
little religion of the right kind brings society to us in 
rich and loving measure. " Here is another hundred 
dollars for you, my son," said the wealthy father as 
his boy started for college, '^ you have not got much 
brains, and less persistency, so you will need the more 
money to get through with." A little religion goes 
very far in reducing the expenses of life. Without it 
we ache for a coach, with it walking becomes a privi- 
lege ; then a mansion is our idea, now a cottage be- 
comes regal ; then the woman longs for power, now 
she rejoices in the opportunity of serving ; then she 
needs roses, ribbons and rouge to make her beauti- 
ful, now the kindliness in her eye, the gentleness of 
her voice, and the grace of helping hands make her 
beautiful without these. There are those of whom we 



8 THE ECOK^OMIES OF RELIGION. 

need not ask, ^^ What did they wear?*' in order to 
know whether they were beautiful or not ; and they 
are the ones religion has draped in common sense, 
and upon whose brow she has placed the imprint oj 
moral earnestness. Nothing but religion in its larg- 
est interpretation lifts the soul above its selfish needs, 
arms it with self denial and endows it with the cheap 
joys of disinterestedness. Much has been said of the 
power of religion in enabling great souls to make 
great sacrifices. That is a finer revelation of its power 
that shows it lifting common souls above trifling wants 
and petty appetites. It sometimes takes more religion 
to wear a turned dress into company than to leave 
father and mother for conscience sake. There are 
women, perhaps in this presence, who would die at 
the stake for their convictions, were it necessary now% 
as it would have been three or four hundred years 
ago ; but they will probably give their conscience 
the slip for three or four Sundays when Easter time 
comes, if the milliner disappoints them about their 
spring hats. There are men here who would stand 
guard all night rather than see free thought cramped, 
or free speech hampered ; but they will let free speech 
and high thinking be fettered and checked for a 
whole year rather than to forego the cigar, the funds 
spent for which are necessary to sustain freedom of 



THE ECONOMIES OF RELIGION. 9 

thought and speech. ^' Hard times," what are they ? 
The result of our collective dissipations, the product 
of the common extravagances and useless indulgences 
of society. There are those who are too poor in 
time, strength or money to attend any church, who 
can afford but few, if any, of the external ministra- 
tions of religion, even the simplest, but who have 
time enough to read the thirty or forty volumes 
written by Mrs. Southworth, while the eight volumes 
of George Eliot must go unread. They have no time 
to study a single noble poem of Lowell, Browning or 
Wordsworth, but plenty of time to spend hours over 
the current scandal and the flippant thought of the 
newspaper. The tailor and the dressmaker rule these 
with an iron rod. Their time, money and strength 
are taxed to the utmost in the giddy chase after the 
frivolities of life. Too poor for the quest of religion, 
rich enough to blight their children with mischievous 
indulgence and pampered luxuries. Nothing but a 
baptism of the Holy Spirit of religion will ennoble 
the intellect, chasten the appetite, and sanctify the 
affections of life. When our lives are most in attune 
with high things, how many clamorous wants recede 
into the background! At such moments the few things 
we do have make our lives very blessed and our days 
very rich. What we need is to extend these appreci- 



10 THE ECONOMIES OF RELIGION. 

ative moments into weeks and years; that our ener- 
gies may be directed to higher, and on that account, 
less costly, pursuits. 

II. Religion teaches us to make judicious investments, 
— It says to the shop girl, '' Adorn your mind before 
you hang trinkets in your ears.'' To the clerk, '^ Burn 
not that in your mouth that you may need on your 
back.'* '' I buy no books except for pressing needs. 
Last year I bought fifteen hundred dollars' worth, this 
year I shall not order two hundred dollars' worth. 
I may want the money for cannon," wrote Theodore 
Parker to John P. Hale, in 1856, as his prophetic 
soul anticipated the dread struggle for liberty. This 
is the insight and the discrimination that religion 
will give to every young man and woman It in- 
spires them to save their money, to buy the muni- 
tions of war that are necessary to wage successfully 
the battle of life. Religion says to the father, '^ Bet- 
ter give your son a conviction, upon which he may 
ride upon a crusade against wrong, ignorance and 
poverty, than to give him a horse to ride upon th e 
boulevard, and the former may cost less than the lat- 
ter. Better a noble enthusiasm, a great desire to re- 
alize what may seem to be the impossible, than the 
aimless drawing of the ribbons over the finest thor- 
oughbred in a way that will leave the man poorer 



THE ECOJ^OMiiiS OF RELIGIOlST. 11 

and weaker after every drive; for indolent indulgence 
debilitates the soul as opiates do the body.'' Relig- 
ion says to the mother, *^ Fine clothes will draw to 
the side of your daughter many suitors, but a fine 
disposition will draw better ones." Religion teaches 
the father that of all the life insurance companies the 
Eternal Life is the most trustworthy, the assessments 
for which are paid in good deeds, the death losses 
settled out of the accumulations of character. Relig- 
ion pleads with the parent and says, ^^ If you can 
leave your children no other heritage, leave them a 
spotless name ; let the fires of their lives be kindled 
by the flame of your devotion and the glowing embers 
of your loyalty. Giving them this you give them a 
wealth that death itself cannot take away." 

III. Religion multiplies our resources. — It increases 
our producing power. It is itself productive capital. 
Are you too poor to travel and see the marvels of 
other climes? So was Henry Thoreau ; but God met 
him on Walden Pond, and his eyes discovered more 
of the divine and the beautiful in the woods of Con- 
cord, on the beach of Cape Cod, in the Maine for- 
ests, than most travelers see on the Rhine or amid 
the Alps. '' Why go to Italy to see the marvels of a 
sunset while you have it at your own back door? " 
asks Emerson. It is because religion has not opened 



12 THE ECOKOMIES OP RELIGION. 

our eyes to the near marvel and the besetting glory. 
What though 

''Cleon hath a million acres, 
Yet the landscape I. 

* ;}c ;^ sH * 

Cleon sees no charm in nature, 

In a daisy I ; 
Cleon hears no anthem singing 

In the sea and sky ; 
Nature sings to me forever. 

Earnest listener I ; 
State for state, with all attendants, 

Who will change? Not I." 

The resources of a religious spirit are never meas- 
ured by its surroundings. Goethe studied and wrote 
in a bare attic room, without even an arm chair. 
Dore conjured from the hidden depths of his own 
soul those weird forms, which, once having been 
seen, haunt you forevermore, in a room naked as a 
carpenter shop. The young lady who courts art as a 
worldly accomplishment gives great attention to her 
tools, Her pencil, easel and palette must all be artist- 
ically conceived before she can begin her work; while 
he who is touched with the religious inspiration that 
impels him to art makes his beginning, like Benjamin 
West, with a piece of charcoal and a barn door. The 
common clay in the Roman hills, which to the citi- 



THE ECOKOMIES OF RELIGION. 13 

zens yielded but mud, Angelo turned into the ochre 
with which he illuminated his matchless frescoes. 

Thus it is that religion ^^ raises the poor out of the 
dust and places them among princes"; enables them 
to meet their poverty with ampler resources. When 
we get at the heart of the matter we shall find that 
men and women die daily, more from want of re- 
ligion than from want of medicine. Ten thousand 
die from heart and head starvation for every one 
that dies from bodily starvation. The skilled phy- 
sician knows that even our bodily ailments must be 
reached through moral rather than through physical 
forces. Dr. Brown-Sequard, a high medical author- 
ity, has said, '' Bread pills in the hands of a trusted 
physician will do more than the best medicines in the 
hands of one who cannot mspire such confidence." 
^* Give me a great thought that I may refresh myself 
with it," said the dying Herder; ^^Read me some- 
thing from Paul, something that has got meat in it," 
stammered Lute Taylor, dying in the midst of a half 
developed life. This is the refreshment and the 
nourishment which religion gives. We all need it, 
more than the German philosopher or the unschooled 
poet of Wisconsin. 

Do I discover a twinkle in your eye? do you 
uspect me of having indulged in a bit of special 



14 THE ECONOMIES OF RELIGION. 

pleading, a more or less ingenious way of begging 
for a ^^ cause"? The cause of religion has no 
need of beggars. God is no pauper. The church 
that is classified among '* charitable institutions/' 
and receives its support from your ''charities^'' has 
little claim upon my sympathies. I plead for that 
life of thought and feeling that makes this world a 
hospitable home for the homeless; that gives the 
solitary a sense of kinship with all that is human, that 
transforms the forge, the workshop and the counting 
room into academies of the spirit, wherein the labor- 
er may become a student of eternal things. I plead 
for that love of truth that makes the laboratory and 
the observatory sacred altars of religion, and all truth 
seekers and truth tellers, priests and prophets of the 
soul, teachers of the lesson best taught by the great- 
est prophet of souls when he said, ^^The kingdom of 
heaven is within you." Thus it is that the infinite 
resources become our resources, the divine bounty 
overflows our poverty, and ** the poor are raised out 
of the dust," and are enabled ^* to stand among 
princes," where they^belong. 



BREAD VEfRSUS IDEAS. 



IS NOT THE LIFE MORE THAN MEAT, AND THE BODY 
THAN RAIMENT? — Matt.Vt. 2^. 

I would discuss briefly and with great frankness the 
relations of bread to ideas, of body to mind, of the 
physical to the spiritual. I do not wish to beg the 
question. I believe in the sacredness of every fact, 
and so I admit at the outset that this present life of 
ours is squarely grounded in the physical. The dis- 
eased mind often springs from a diseased body. The 
morals of a city are related to the sanitary conditions 
of its streets. '^ Health keeps atheism in the dark," 
it is said. I have always thought that Calvinism was 
related to dyspepsia, and that probably the only real 
believers in that dreary doctrine to-day are those suf- 
fering from chronic gastric inflammation. Probably 
the best way to do away with the gloomy '* Decrees'* 
and *' Fore-ordination*' is to reduce the number of 
torpid livers in the community. Proper attention to 
diet may bring more sunshine into some souls than a 
course of religious reading would. I remember that 
a gill of alcohol will not only make a wise man a fool, 

15 



16 BREAD VERSUS IDEAS. 

but will make a good man a rascal. It will change a 
devotee into a criminal. A tunk on the head will 
make an imbecile out of a philosopher. Professor 
Bain tells us that '^ bodily afflictions not infrequently 
change the moral nature.'' The brain takes about 
one-fifth of the blood of the system. When the blood 
is impoverished of course the workings of the brain 
deteriorate, and the problems of the minister as well 
as those of the physician grow complicated. Sir 
Henry Holland, noted scholar and physician to the 
Queen, while exploring some of the deep mines in 
the Hartz mountains became so weary that he could 
not remember a word of the German language, and 
he was led out by a guide with whom he could not 
communicate. When he had eaten and rested he was 
again the accomplished German scholar. Doctors 
sometimes detect a disease of the brain by a peculiar 
delicacy of the senses, or vigor of the imagination. 
People are affected by their surroundings. Hard work 
and poor food will dull the brightest intellect, and 
harden the tenderest conscience. The stern charac- 
ter and massive intellect of Scotland, the slovenly 
habit and sensuous poetry of Spain, find their expla- 
nation in the climate and natural surroundings, as 
Buckle and Draper have shown. Let a nervous, en- 
ergetic, whittling, whistling Yankee from New Eng- 



BREAD VERSUS IDEAS. 17 

land live twenty years in Louisiana, and he becomes 
a tardy, drawling, shambling fellow, who lolls list- 
lessly into town upon the back of a mule, with a 
gunny sack for saddle, a rope for a bridle rein; proud, 
happy and indolent as any native. 

Facts of this class teach us to be respectful of body, 
and mindful of its needs. They prove that the gloomy 
anchorite in his cave, the howling dervish hacking 
his body with rusty cutlass, and the -^ aerial birds,*' 
as they were called, who, like Simon Stylites, on 
stony pillars tortured their nerves and starved their 
veins in order to overcome the flesh and win heaven, 
were not only wrong in theory, but wicked in prac- 
tice. These facts tempt us to reverse the Bible text 
and say, '^ Take great thought as to what ye shall eat 
and what ye shall drink, and give large heed to the 
body as to what ye shall put on.'* Such facts compel 
us to recognize as divine the inspiration that enables 
father and mother to tear themselves from dear asso- 
ciations, face the hardships of the wilderness, battle 
with the fierce beasts of the forests, and the fiercer 
poison of the swamps, that thereby their children may 
perchance escape the thraldom of matter. I under- 
stand and honor the thousands who toil and moil in 
season and out of season for food and raiment. I can 
understand why good men withdraw their patronage 



18 BREAD VERSUS IDEAS. 

from living issues, absent themselves from church and 
schools in order to be more sure of bread. 

I discover the grain of truth at the bottom of the 
Gradgrind philosophy that says, ^' Let your children 
be educated for practical ends. Give them something 
tangible, something that will make them successful 
bread winners." Poetry, art, letters and music are 
being quietly elbowed to one side in many of our 
later theories of education in order that the multipli- 
cation and interest tables may be more glorified. 
These are supposed to have in them large life-saving 
power. This line of reasoning leads to the apotheosis 
of the dollar. The deity at whose shrine America is 
ever prone to bow in united worship is a paper idol, 
the Te Deum of which is, ^^All hail the Almighty 
Dollar!" 

Having said so much in the. interests of bread, let 
us face another class of facts as startling, imperative 
and scientific as these. If indigestion breeds Calvin- 
ism, so fear and mental anxiety bring dyspepsia. If 
there be soul misery the body will surely be lean and 
the face haggard. Bain is a writer suspected of 
materialistic tendency, but he admits that '^the in- 
fluence of mental changes upon the body is supported 
by an equal array of testimony." Indeed, will we 
not all admit that the thrilling pages in human his- 



BREAD VERBTJR IDEAS. 19 

tory are those [which tell of men rising superior to 
surroundings, compelling circumstances to yield ?^ — 
such pages as tell of Hannibal leading his hosts 
across the ice-blockaded Alps, or Washington and 
his patriots marking the frozen roads of Valley Forge 
with the blood that flowed from naked feet. Ideas 
have flamed into a glory which has encircled the 
globe, rising from the fires that v/ere built to destroy 
them. Hearts have fought off disease and death for 
the sake of loving and protecting others. Mind has 
emitted a light that never wanes upon brows pallid 
with disease. It has painted death-blanched cheeks 
with immortal beauty. Paschal, Shelley, Channing, 
Theodore Parker, Starr King, and hundreds of oth- 
ers in all departments of thought and philanthropy 
have dipped their ladles into the boiling oil of thought 
heated from within. They made their mark, won 
their race like the steamer that burns its own decks 
in order to have fuel enough to make the harbor. 
Much of the immortal literature fell not from hands 
sustained by steady pulse in elegant conditions, but 
was thrown off by hands trembling with aching 
nerves. Its sentences were born upon burdened 
breath. Many of its gems have been written by men 
like Robert Burns, so closely encased in the inhos- 
pitable matter, the prison cells which we politely call 



20 BREAD VERSUS IDEAS. 

environments, that like the prisoners they were, they 
had to cut their own veins in order to find ink in- 
tense enough to write their thoughts. I have seen 
beardless boys lift haggard bodies from death-stricken 
couches to brighten again the rusty gun, and to 
march once more to life, in obedience to the sum- 
mons to do battle for ideas the heart loved. I 
have seen trembling women walk with transcendent 
steadiness through clotted gore, that they might stay 
the costly flow from severed arteries. I have seen, 
and so have you, mothers fight their way back from 
death* s door into the possession of some poor frag- 
ment of a body, chiefly by love's weapons, because 
the youngest born was not strong enough to do with- 
out a mother's care. There is no meaning to the 
story of the pioneer's endurance if it does not prove 
the superiority of mind to body, if it does not 
show that a moral purpose, an idea, apparently the 
most imponderable and intangible thing in the uni- 
verse, is the sublime element in that which is noblest 
in the story of America's settlement. 

No, friends, it will not do to trust too much to 
circumstances^ for the equation of our life cannot be 
wrought out without introducing that large factor 
that is represented by the '^ ^^;^/^r-stance " as Emer- 
son somewhere calls it. What will he who is trying 



BREAD VEKSUS IDEAS. 21 

to build up life from the bread end alone, do with 
the most unique and in many respects the greatest of 
Americans? Untutored parentage, a home in the 
sub-aqueous and malarial fiats of southern Illinois, 
coarse companions, a few books, — out of these con- 
ditions there towered the columnar figure, whose 
name will glow with perennial freshness upon that 
obelisk where honor inscribes the names of the sav- 
iors of men. When the names of the petted sons of 
fortune, the recipients of what we call ^^good advan- 
tages '* will have gone down into eternal oblivion, the 
name of Abraham Lincoln will be a star toward 
which the admiring eyes of earth's noblest will be 
turned in evidence that ^* life is more than meat.*' 
It was not bread, but ideas that made him great. 
The problem of the century was somehow focalized 
in the loving heart that lay within that awkward 
frame. The soul took up the burden. It moulded 
matter. It wove its own body. Carpenter, the 
artist of the Emancipation Proclamation, says that if 
the assassin's hand had allowed the creating spirit to 
have gone on chiseling that face twenty years more, 
it would have been one of the fairest as well as one 
of the noblest faces in the land. Do not wring in 
the law of exceptions in this case. With Lovvell I 
bold that Lincoln was made '' out of the very earthy 



22 BREAD VERSUS IDEAS. 

nnancestered, unprivileged and unknown, to show us 
how much truth, how much magnanimity, how much 
statecraft await the call of opportunity in simple 
manhood, when it believes in the justice of God, and 
the worth of man. " 

Let this ^^ brave, far-seeing man" illustrate the 
power of any soul that believes in ideas more than in 
bread, in life more than meat, in the forces of mind 
as superior to the forces of matter. This is good sci- 
ence as well as good religion. If the minister needs 
the help of a doctor to save a soul from a hell that is 
to be, the doctor needs the help of a minister to save 
the soul from the hell that now is. 

What is the result thus far? Have I set up a hope- 
less paradox? Must it be forever the old battle of 
bread against ideas? Bodily wants against living 
principles ? Must we select one or the other ? Let 
us be careful and make no mistakes here. The miser 
concludes to stand for the bread line. He believes 
that in the long run money is the best thing. The 
business man who burns all his energies in the store, 
and carries in his heart nothing but cinders and ashes 
home at night; the woman who concludes that she 
must ^* put on a little style if one is ever to be any- 
body," who buys her daughter a new dress with the 
money that ought to be spent for her schooling; the 



BEEAD VERSUS IDEAS. 23 

man who agrees with my tailor when he says, ^^ God 
made man, but the tailor made the gentleman," all 
decide for bread as against ideas. On the other 
hand, monk, nun, and Protestant devotee, who pro- 
fess a contempt for the good things of this world, 
who are in a hurry to go where they are not yet 
wanted — else they'd be sent for — take sides against 
the bread and what it stands for. Now, all these 
make a sad mistake. The cook loses her appetite in the 
cooking. The external show, intended to introduce 
the son and daughter into society, shuts the gate in 
their face. The woman that studies the fashion 
plates most is generally ill dressed. The cultivated 
milliner would not be seen wearing the bonnet she 
has prepared for her ambitious customer. The dress- 
maker is generally better dressed, artistically speak- 
ing, than her best customer, for she dresses to live, 
while some of the others seem to live to dress. 
Equally disappointing are those who, in this divorce 
of bread and ideas, take sides with the soul against 
the body. They who oppose this world and its ma- 
terial good are oftentimes the most material in their 
worship, and unspiritual in their dream of heaven. 
They who have most contempt for body are often- 
times haunted by the most gross desires and the most 
lustful appetites. 



24 BREAD VERSUS IDEAS. 

The truth is, one is necessary to the other. Bread 
and ideas are different factors in the same reality of 
life. Science and religion both insist that the word 
^^soul" stands for the central verity, to which the 
body ministers, and from which the body derives its 
right to be. Ignoring soul you have no use for body. 
Recognizing it you cannot be too respectful to body. 
These are two parts of the one whole, the life that 
now is. What hurts one must hurt both. 

" This world's no blot for us, 
Nor blank — it means intensely, and means good: 
To find its meaning is my meat and drink." 

Let US beware, then, of that undevout ignorance that 
either offers indignity to body or is indifferent to the 
needs of mind. Le„ us revere the holy currents that 
go throbbing through the arteries to feet, hand and 
brain, because they sail our ships of thought. These 
red rivers are sacred rivers because they float our af- 
fection and land their choicest cargoes in the citadel 
of mind. 

The philosophy of evolution is yet to render to re- 
ligion and morals a service as great as that which it 
has already rendered to science. It is to teach that 
soul is the latest prodnct of God's creating power, 
and that the latest is the highest. The greatest thing 
in man is mind, ideas are the regnant forces that con- 



\ 



BREAD VERSUS IDEAS. 25 

trol and amend all that is below. Hail, then, you 
'' Bread Winner!^' Heaven's benediction is yonrs. 
Get bread, money, lands, houses, if in the getting 
you are expanding your soul, ripening your heart, 
increasing your stock of ideas: but if you get these 
things for any other purpose, you get them at your 
peril. Luxury sought for itself ends in rottenness of 
body and selfishness of spirit. He who works only 
for his surroundings, expecting happiness from exter- 
nals, will find life at last becoming a scramble, — 

" Every door is bared with gold and opens but to golden 
keys. 

Every gate is thronged with suitors, all the markets over- 
flow." 

To him 

" The jingling of the guinea helps the hurt that honor feels, 
And the nations do but murmur, snarling at each other's 
heels." 

He who tries to find bread, money or beauty from 
without, rather than by developing them from with- 
in, through tears or through frowns, will be compelled 
to exclaim : 

" Cursed be the social wants that sin against the strength of 

youth. 
Cursed be the social lies that warp us from the living truth! 



26 BREAD VERSUS IDEAS. 

Cursed be the sickly forms that err from honest Nature's 

rule! 
Cursed be the gold that gilds the straitened forehead of the 

fool!" 

To struggle for bread more than for ideas ; to trust 
matter more than spirit j to favor body more than 
soul ; to believe in hand-skill more than heart-skill, 
may make Vanderbilts, but it will make no Peabodys. 
It may give manners, but no morals. It may teach 
you a little logic, but no song. It may give eyes, but 
no vision ; give sight, but no insight. It may teach 
you to plod, but not to fly — nay, not even to walk in 
noble, manlike fashion. 

But you say once more, '^ I must live, and conse- 
quently must make bread the prime object of life.'' 
I don't know about that. If in living you are to go 
about drying out your soul, shriveling your mind un- 
til it rattles like dry beans in a pod, perhaps you had 
'^ better die," as George McDonald once said in this 
city, ^^ and go to God where you belong." But I 
deny the alternative. Season your life with ideas, 
and your bread will be the more sure and far more 
palatable. Make Spirit and it will give you Body. 
Seek Soul and the other things will be added unto 
you. Find love in your life and the energies that 
sow and reap, that stitch and bake/ will not^be want- 



BREAD VERSUS IDEAS. 27 

ing. Given a great concern for the kingdom of God, 
and a splendid purpose to establish it here on earth, 
and you may be sure that bread and clothes and 
houses will be looked after. * ' The life is more than 
meat/* This text never leads to aimless and listless 
living. The man who believes in the Providence of 
ideas does not go begging from door to door for 
bread and coat, any more than does the lily go 
tramping for its beauty. The tramp belongs to a 
very different order of being. They who most appre- 
ciate mind best understand the need of body and are 
most competent to provide for the same. No, it is 
no longer bread versus ideas, but bread and ideas; 
bread by means of ideas. Let ideas assume command 
and the battle for bread and meat is more easily won. 
To my thinking it is time that the old lines between 
heaven and earth, between religion and business, be 
destroyed forever. The piety that is practical recog- 
nizes that the supreme thing is to do the best thing 
within your power in the best way you can, and 
to do it now and here, and to keep on doing it, from 
this time forth forevermore, world without end. It 
matters not whether that thing be baking bread or 
composing symphonies, making horseshoes or singing 
psalms. They all belong to the religious life if truly 
done. Food and raiment become as much a part of 



28 BREAD VERSUS IDEAS. 

such piety as the petals are to the rose, or as the 
feathers are to the bird. 

Yes, ideas vindicate the seeker and encourage the 
seeking. With his thoughts the human touches con- 
sciously the divine ; the Finite merges itself into the 
Infinite. He who can measure a star is greater than 
that star. The thought of infinity is the nearest 
thing to Infinity itself Gird your loins, then, 
and press forward with renewed courage in this race 
for ideas. In this chase do you escape from the 
trammels of matter into the fellowship of spirit. In 
this search we cease to bear the image of the animal 
from which we came and begin to assume the features 
of the angel that we may become. By the power of 
ideas we cease to be slaves and rise to the dignity of 
freemen. The shackles of bigotry, ignorance and 
superstition fall off, and the soul, unfettered, revels in 
a boundless universe of truth, beauty and love. These 
are the only perennial elements of the universe. 
Empires with their external glory have gone. Con- 
tinents whereon were once gathered tumultuous tides 
of life have been engulfed, and now the ceaseless 
waves of ocean cover them. Mountains in their grim 
strength are being dissolved by the relentless chem- 
istry of nature. Wind, sun, rain and frost file their 
sides, chisel their height, and the time will be when 



BREAD VERSUS IDEAS. 29 

they are not, but an unseen , an intangible idea 
endures. 

Where now are the dynasties of the Orient ? All , 
that is left of them is found in Vedic hymn, Bud- 
dhistic wisdom, Persian lore and Egyptian scroll. 
Where now lies the glory of Solomon, the power of 
his kingdom, the beauty of his temple? They are 
found only in the imperishable prophets, the inde- 
structible beauty of the Psalms and the incomparable 
charm of Job. Grecian power and glory are lost to 
sight, but Greece is still young in the songs of her 
Homer, in the beauty of her Venus of Milo, her 
Elgin Marbles and the writings of Plato, still the 
epitome of libraries. The Roman empire collapsed 
like an exploded balloon from too great an inflation; 
but the Roman idea embodied in Roman law is still 
the inexhaustible fountain of modern jurisprudence. 
The old Vikings no longer sail the northern seas, but 
their Sagas, the garden in which were planted their 
ideas, bloom with fresh beauty under the genial 
warmth of modern scholarship. No longer does the 
Druid bow beneath the mistletoe that hangs on Brit- 
ish Oak, or is the harp heard in Tara's hall, but 
Keltic ideas woven into the Bardic fragments of 
Taliessin and others remain to yield to Emerson 
^' more true poetry than volumes of British classics." 



30 BREAD VERSUS IDEAS. 

Thus is it ever ; ideas, the high price of which tempt 
us to shrink from the purchase, endure, priceless 
gems in the cabinet of the universe, outshining and 
outlasting the stars themselves; for ideas are ^Hhe 
thoughts of God," which slowly, painfully, man, his 
child, '4s learning to think after him," and 

"One accent of the Holy Ghost 
The heedless world has never lost." 



PRESENT SANCTITIES. 



PUT OFF THY SHOES FROM OFF THY FEET, FOR THE 
PLACE WHEREON THOU STANDEST IS HOLY GROUND. — 

Exodus iu\^. 

The place whereon you and I stand now, and here, 
is holy ground. Why? 

I . Because we are standing in the presence of the 
Eternal Mystery, All around us burns the divine 
flame that illumines without consuming. The burn- 
ing bush is before us, and out of its central glory 
speaks the voice of the living God. I deal with facts, 
and not fancy. The ground whereon we stand teems 
with mystic life, throbs with the pulse of Infinite 
power. The snow flake is rayed like a star. The an- 
gled facets of the grain of sand are polished by the 
Geometrician of the heavens. The granite boulder 
was shaped by the same laws that lift the Alps so 
high, and line with gold and silver the bowels of 
the Sierras. The pebble is a colony of atoms, builded 
together according to a pattern designed in the same 
council chambers that fitted the heart of man to that 
of woman and caused the head of the babe to nestle 

31 



32 PRESENT SANCTITIES. 

on the mother's breast. The blade of grass is instmct 
with the secret of the pine. The commonest tree is 
an embodied providence to unnumbered thousands 
of fellow beings. 

" There is never a leaf nor blade too mean 
To be some happv creature's palace." 

Where we stand is holy ground. 

" Whether we look, or whether we listen. 
We hear life murmur, or see it glisten ; 
Every clod feels a stir of might, 

An instinct within it that reaches and towers, 
And, groping blindly above it for light, 

Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers ; 
The flush of life may well be seen 

Thrilling back over hills and valleys." 

Day floods the ground whereon we stand with 
glory. Night shadows it with awe. Summer paints 
it in beauty. Winter jewels it with diamonds '^ of 
purest rays serene. '* Here is holy ground, for all the 
infinities of space center here for us. From this 
spot, like the spokes in a wheel, ray all the forces of 
matter, and Nature has rimmed this wheel with the 
circlet of her laws. Bring your microscope, telescope, 
spectroscope, and solvents; let the botanist, geolo- 
gist and astronomer teach us all they know; let 
chemistry, optics and the mechanic arts do for us all 



PRESENT SAKCTITIES. 33 

they can ; let us give our lives to the use of these 
tools and the study of these lines, and then we shall 
die in old age, sobered with the thought that we have 
just begun to study the sanctities of this little spot of 
ground whereon we stand. 

2. This is holy ground because it is sanctified with 
human 7iature. Under our feet is the dust of the toil- 
ing generations that have gone before. We walk 
among the graves of unnumbered ancestors. We talk 
of the *Miew West/' with a history only a century 
long. But every foot of this ground is saturated with 
mothers' tears, colored with heroes' blood, and every 
new grave adds sacredness to the ground whereon we 
stand to-day. It is only our short memories that put 
a boundary around our graveyards. *^ God's acre " 
is everywhere. We cannot go where the dead are not. 
Petty are the genealogies of the books. Insignificant 
are the titles of descent which the noblest aristocrat 
can boast of; but great is the real ancestry of the 
meanest beggar. From the most primitive man uj) 
through experimenting, blundering ages has he come. 
Alexander and Csesar, Socrates and Newton, King 
Arthur and King Alfred, Wellington and Washington 
are his inheritance. The graves of Lincoln, Garfield 
and General Grant are guarded night and day by 
armed sentinels. This is a grateful nation's per- 



34 PRESENT SANCTITIEi. 

petual token of respect ; but each one of us is a sen- 
tinel placed on duty to guard sacred memories greater 
than Lincoln*s or Grant's, the memory of humanity, 
the great man universal of which these are but frag^ 
ments. We talk of ancient history, the myths ot 
Greece and the legends of Rome. 1 tell you the tra- 
ditions of Chicago are as sacred to us did we but know 
them. Horeb, Mount Ida, the seven sacred hills of 
Rome are secular grounds compared with the sanctity 
of the ground whereon we now stand. Over this 
lake shore hover the triumphs and defeats of men, the 
joys and sorrows of women, out of which may yet 
grow legends as full of poetry as those of Troy, as 
gracious as those of Athens, as religious as those of 
Eden. The first white man who built his shanty on 
the marshy bank of the Chicago river, built in obedi- 
ence to the same deep, unconscious tuition that taught 
Moses to build wiser than the Pharaohs, and to shape 
out of Egypt's slaves a power vastly superior to Egypt. 
I tell you, friends, to realize the sanctities of to-day 
is more religous than to pine for the sanctities of the 
long ago. To see the spirit of God in the striving 
men and women here in lUinios is higher vision than 
that which limits the revelations of God to Old Tes- 
tament miracle or to New Testament parable. If you 
expect to find your soul thriUed with the Divine voice 



PRESENT SAKCTITTES. 35 

as was Moses', you must seek the flaming bush, burn- 
ing but unconsumed, here in Chicago, not at Horeb. 
It burned there for Moses, it burns here for you. 

3. Whereon you stand is holy ground because you 
stand there, '^ Wherever McGregor sits, there is the 
head of the table." Wherever the foot of man is 
placed, there is holy ground. I do not go in search 
of saint or martyr ; I do not mean General This or 
Captain That, not Duke nor Squire ; J3ut, put the foot 
of any body that contains a human soul on any bit of 
ground and you have sanctified it with the choicest 
product of nature. There are no distillations so rare as 
the love of a human heart \ no forces under the sun 
so mysterious as those that work in the human will. 
^^The ground whereon you stand is holy ground" 
because you stand there, you the heir of all the ages, 
you in whose better thoughts live the immortal dead, 
— *Hhe choir invisible" who sing in your joy, whose 
triumphs nerve you '- to deeds of daring rectitude." 

The self-sacrifice of the martyrs instructs you to 
^^ scorn the miserable aims that end in self." Your 
brain is fertile with the deposits of your ancestors. 
Your blood is rich with the triumphs of your fore- 
runners. Your heart is made tender with the tears 
of the mothers that were unappreciated in life, and 
are forgotten in death. 



36 PRESENT SANCTITIES. 

Not only on account of your inheritance, but on 
account of your prospects, do you consecrate the 
ground you stand on. You are standing at the near 
end of a line that reaches farther into the future than 
into the past. It is your opportunity to speak the 
word to the child that will go on enlarging the 
boundaries of truth, making music throughout all 
eternity. The mountaineer with a puff of breath 
sounds a note on his Alpine horn that goes echoing 
among the peaks and around the crags until miles 
and miles away, it strikes the ear of a fellow mount- 
aineer, who, with another puff of breath, sends back 
the melodious though lusty response. So is it your 
opportunity, where you now stand, to breathe into 
your trumpet that which will echo and re-echo amid 
the hills and valleys of the future, sure to find 
response in the life of some climber yet to come. 
Says Emerson: ^' It is a mischievous notion that we 
are come late into nature, as if the world was finished 
a long time ago. As the world was plastic in the 
hands of God, so it is ever to such influences as we 
bring to it. To ignorance and sin alone it is flint.*' 
Remember this, friends, and then you will under- 
stand your opportunity. An unfinished world is 
about you, waiting your finishing touches. You, a 
builder, are standing in the presence of the incom- 



PREREISTT SANCTITIES. 8t 

pleted walls of the temple of God. It is your oppor- 
tunity to add to it, here a stone and there an orna- 
ment. 

I am not dealing in ideal extravagance. ''The 
one thing of most value in the world is an active 
soul/' says Emerson. And I tell you there is more 
of God to you in the palpitations of your own heart 
when it is stirred with pity for a dog ; there is more 
of the divine glory made manifest to you in the rose 
that has bloomed through your care ; there is more of 
the infinite mercy for you in the sympathy you have 
for the besotted tramp that called on you yesterday; 
in the patient care you bestow upon the sickly, dirty 
child that does not belong to you, than there is in all 
the bibles that have descended from the elder days of 
Asia; bibles that require a lexicon to read, a theologian 
to interpret, and which necessitate creeds and con- 
ventions to decide upon their meanings to you. Miss 
Cleveland, in her essay on Charlemagne, says: ''If 
the singers had been content to let Arthur alone, we 
might now hav^e had a history of him.'* And so I 
sometimes think if the theologians would let you 
poor souls alone, and give you a chance,' you would 
find God for yourselves, and that there would come 
to you a revelation of the Almighty as there did to 
Moses. 



38 PRESENT SANCTITIES. 

Science shows you to-day marvels a thousand times 
more awe-inspiring and convincing than the most 
majestic of old time miracles. Geology tells of a 
Genesis more sublime than that in the Pentateuch. 
The Sermon on the Mount is verified and enforced by 
the facts of social science when the rhetoric of the 
preacher fails. Oh, we talk too much of '"■ mediation ' ' 
and 'Mnediators/' and too little of the truth that 
comes first hand to the soul — the salvation that is 
direct from God. After all, he does not reveal him- 
self by proxy, but by his proximity. '^ He is nigh 
unto all of us.'' God is the present, pressing loving 
power within and around your life and mine where 
we now stand, or else He is nowhere. He is in the 
burning bush of October by our roadside, that flames 
but is not consumed ; or else he is a myth. He re- 
veals himself to you through the little Messiah, that 
you tucked into his cozy crib to-night, or else you 
are mistaken about the Bethlehem manger. 

*' He that would bring home the wealth of the In- 
dies must carry out the wealth of the Indies." It 
takes a revealing soul to understand God's revelation. 
There is that back of the eye without which the best 
eye would be blind as a policeman's lantern. 

'^ Where you stand is holy ground," because you 
are the God-detecting instrument. ^^ Where man 



PRESENT SANCTITIES. 39 

can read God directly the hour is too precious to be 
wasted in other men's transcripts of their readings/* 
says our Seer. The most that these transcripts of 
other men's discoveries of God can do for us is to 
show us where to look ; they cannot see for us. Nor 
can we look through their eyes. We turn in vain 
the leaves of big books to find 

*' The subtler meaning of what roses say." 

When 

'' In there breaks the sudden rose herself, 
Over us, under, round us every side, 
Nay, in and out the tables and the chairs, 
And musty volumes, big books and all, — 
Buries us with a glory, young once more, 
Pouring heaven into this shut house of life." 

'* Whereon thou standest is holy ground.*' My 
text holds at once the most damaging lie of theology 
and the most inspiring truth in religion » Let us look 
at the error first. If you read in it of the special 
sanctity of a far off time and place, unattainable and 
unknown to other places, you read that which will 
bring confusion into your thinking, and loneliness 
into your life. It will paralyze present joy and chill 
present duty. If you are led by this story to suspect 
that God was nearer to Mount Horeb four thousand 
years ago than he is to day to Pikers Peak,^ — except 



40 PRESENT SANCTITIES. 

when Moses was there, — it will cheapen your science 
and probably mar many things which ought to be 
sacred to you. 

But if it teaches you of the immanent God, whose 
glory ever breaks upon an open eye, whose voice is 
ever heard by the uncovered ear, that, given a Moses 
at the foot of Pike's Peak, he there would hear of 
the summons to stand with unsandaled feet in the 
divine presence, life itself becomes a continuous 
book of revelation. God is the Immeasurable Pres- 
ence. All history is Holy Bible. All science is 
revelation, and all struggling for the good, the true 
and the beautiful becomes religion. 

Do not misunderstand me. I would not have a 
dead level monotony where everything is diversity. 
There are uplands and lowlands of the spirit as well 
as of nature. Soul has its valley and snow-capped 
peaks as well as the earth. Sinai and Olivet do 
tower sublimely above other heights of the spirit, but 
God floods all peaks with daylight and mantles every 
summit with darkness. 

The light that glistens upon the frozen crown of 
Mont Blanc, ripens the cottager's cherries in the 
valley, and gives fragrance to the lily which the cot- 
tager's child plucks. God is the same everywhere ; 
it is only man that changes. 



PRESENT SANOTTTIES. 41 

" We lack but open eye and ear 
To see the orient's marvel here.'' 

Not in one v/ay, but in many ways does God reveal 
himself. '^Duty*' was the king of words to the 
Hebrew ; ^' Beauty ** the watch-word of the Greeks ; 
*'Law/' of Rome; ''Truth" was the search of the 
Hmdoo ; Minstrelsy and Chivalry the inspiration of 
the middle ages; Science and Inventions of the 
nineteenth century. 

"Whatever road I take, it joins the street 
Which leadeth all Avho walk it Thee to meet." 

To every search there is a quick response. The 
experience of all nations proves the truth of the 
oriental couplet, 

" Who comes toward me an inch through doubtings dim 
In blazing light I do advance a yard towards him." 

Some time ago I dropped into the Pacific Garden 
Mission, on Van Buren street. A man stood up and 
said : *' I had been to the mission many times, I had 
heard much of what the Lord had done for Isaiah 
and Paul, but that did no good to me ; but one night 
a brother took me by the hand and said, ' The Lord 
will help you as He has helped me, and I will help 
you if you try. * That night I went home and did 
not get drunk, and ever since I have been a redeemed 



42 PRESENT SAKCTITIES. 

man/' ^^One more question/' said the skillful 
leader. ^* Did you find any way to get along after 
that?'* ^'Yes," was the reply. *^ Inside of four 
days another man of God found me a good position 
on Michigan avenue, and I earn $i8 a month, and 
every one around the house loves me." 

This story reveals the saving forces of that mission 
and all missions. God revealed himself to that poor 
soul, through tlie human heart in Chicago, more than 
through the revelations of Horeb to Moses. What he 
thought to be exceptional was but a small glim- 
mering of the light that floods the world. Stand, then, 
oh soul, erect. Clothe yourself with present sancti- 
ties. Earthly energies bring heavenly peace. Human 
struggles relate themselves to divine helpfulness. 
Every potency in man is a palpable revelation of the 
omnipotency of God. Let us, then, putting ofl" our 
shoes of indolence and selfishness, stand with the 
naked feet of self-sacrifice on this ground made 
sacred by the consecration of the past, the sanctities 
of the present, and the possibilities of the future. 

Fifty years ago, Emerson said to the Harvard 
scholars: *^ Confidence in the unsearched might of 
man belongs, by all motives, by all prophecy, by all 
preparations, to the American scholar." 



PRESEKT SAKCTITrE.S. 43 

This confidence in the '* unsearched might of 
man *' will never be realized until our churches forget 
their dogmatic differences and doctrinal disputes, 
and unite in teaching the simple but great Gospel of 
Character ; not until through morality we climb to 
God, and through ethics we reach that faith in God 
that rests on personal experience. The faith of 
Moses and Jesus makes the nearest mountain of duty 
the Horeb heights of revelation. When we put all 
our might into the right, we- shall find that potency 
that saves sinners unto life eternal. Then we shall 
evermore walk with the unsandaled feet of reverence 
among Present Sanctities, the eternal realities of the 
living God, ^Mn whom we live, and move, and have 
our being." 



THE CLAIMS OF THE CHILDREN. 

LET THE CHILDREN FIRST BE FILLED; FOR IT IS NOT 
MEET TO TAKE THE CHILDREN'S BREAD AND CAST IT TO 

THE DOGS, — Mark vit. 28. 

The children are our divinely appointed executors 
for the future. What are their claims upon us? 

I. The child has a right to be well born. Not 
regeneration, but generation is to be the chief con- 
cern of the new ethics. When religion shall sanctify 
all that pertains to the perpetual incarnation of the 
Divine in human form through birth, our preachers 
will have less to say about second birth. A child 
that is decently born the first time has less need of 
being born again than the hap-hazard child of 
thoughtless, consequently irreverent and sinful, 
parentage. Says Oliver Wendell Holmes : '^ If you 
want to reform a man you must begin with his grand- 
father." The law of heredity is as beautiful as it is 
solemn, as encouraging as it is terrible ; for it not 
only prolongs our weaknesses, but it also perpetuates 
our virtues. It indeed brings our vices out in definite 
outlines ; they are developed like the shadows on the 
sensitive plate of the photographer; but they also 



THE CLAIMS OF THE CHILDREN. 45 

make emphatic our excellencies. That which we 
longed for, but missed, becomes the endowment of our 
child. Our ideals become its blessed destiny. Our 
spiritual struggles become a part of its holy fate. 
Children are being daily born into the world with a 
propulsion towards drunkard's graves. Thousands 
of little lives are launched upon the shores of time 
with a terrible momentum towards the prison and the 
poor-house. 

Let not these facts blind us to other and beautiful 
facts. Thousands of children come into the world with 
the radience of sainthood already haloing their little 
heads. Out of lowliest surroundings Messiah-longings 
are daily fulfilled. In rudest mangers the Christ-child 
is still given to the world. Science does not hesitate to 
say that nature is better able to perpetuate the good 
than the bad ; beauty and virtue are the more persist- 
ent forces. It is the habit of the mother cuckoo to 
deposit her egg in the nest of some other bird, and 
leave it and its outcome to the guardianship of this 
unsuspecting sister, who does not prove unfaithful to 
the trust. Thus for thousands of years, probably, the 
cuckoo has been nurtured by a foster-mother that can 
speak to it only in the homely twitterings of a foreign 
tongue. And yet the song of the cuckoo is one of the 
most persistent and correct of bird melodies. All 



46 THE CLAIMS OF THE CHILDREN. 

over Europe the cuckoo sings one song, and that a 
song which no mother has taught it. This song is an 
imperishable bequest from otherwise ungracious 
parents. When men and women will take this lesson 
home and realize the responsibility of parentage, the 
claims of the unborn, they will be more anxious to 
transmit to their offspring the cuckoo song of cheer- 
fulness and virtue; — a song that will persist in the 
face of neglect, in spite of inhospitable surroundings. 
We need more plain speech and fearless thinking upon 
these matters, if ever the tide of crime and misery is 
to be staid in the world. The holiest functions 
of life are buried under a mantle of prudery which 
breeds coarseness. Divinest love is degraded into 
lust by ignorance. Young men and women, aye 
boys and girls, must know more of the bodies they 
occupy, study more diligently the laws by which God 
repeoples the earth every thirty years. Then the holy 
office of parentage will be assumed with more delibera- 
tion and the number of fractional beings will be 
reduced. Oh ! who hath wisdom enough to discover, 
and life pure enough to declare, the conditions upon 
which the child^s first claims are to be fulfilled ! A 
fair start, a healthy body animated by a spirit that has 
an aptitude for the good, a passion for life in its 
noblest sense. Let parents think much of this. 



THE CLAIMS OF THE CHILDREN. 47 

" Something short in the making, — 
Something lost on the way, 
As the little Soul was taking 
Its path to the break of day ! 

Only bis mood or passion, 

But it twitched an atom back ; 
And she, for her gods of fashion, 

Filched from the pilgrim's pack. 

The Father did not mean it, 

The Mother did not know, 
No human eye had seen it, — 

But the little Soul needed it so ! 



Through the street there passed a cripple, 

Maimed from before its birth ; 
On the strange face gleamed a ripple, 

Like a half -dawn on the earth. 

It passed, — and it awed the city, 

As one not alive nor dead : 
Eyes looked and brimmed with pity, — 

' He is not all there,' they said. 

Not all! for part is behind it, 

Lying dropt on the way ; 
That part— could two but find it. 

How welcome the end of Day ! " 

2. The child has a right to a welcome into the 
world. Let no one interpret the first claim in such 



48 THE CLAIMS OF THE CHILDREN. 

a way as to preclude the second. The babe is no 
mendicant whose arrival is to be dreaded, or whose 
visit is to be regretted. The woman's heart is darkly 
clouded in which there is no holy thirst for mater- 
nity. The man's soul is impure who desires to evade 
the joys of fatherhood. The babe is his own justifi- 
cation. In more primitive ages men used to put coin 
into the hands of the dead, with which to meet the 
expenses of the passage into the other world. The 
babe comes into this world with no silver in its 
hands ; it needs none. It pays its passage in another 
way. It gladdens the darkest hovel, scatters sun- 
shine in the gloomiest poverty, and makes radiant 
the dirtiest alley. 

I believe the world has a right to loyalty and 
cheerfialness at the hands of those who are doomed to 
be childless; because I believe in brave living in ad- 
versity ; but a home in which there is no welcome for 
a little pilgrim, where the child is not desired, is a 
home darkly alienated from God. Its inmates are 
bargaining for that old age that is indeed pitiable — 
one in which decrepitude is not balanced with baby- 
hood, where the trembling voice does not mingle 
with children's laughter. Children have a right to a 
welcome. God has made this claim emphatic. He 
has ordained that the wealth of the household should 



THE CLAIMS OF THE CHILDREN. 49 

be above all other wealth. '^ These are my jewels/' 
said the Roman matron of her children. The Irish 
emigrant in his railroad shanty, the Norwegian peas- 
ant in his Dakota sod-house, that give to this coun- 
try energetic, stirring boys and girls, make to it a 
contribution of far more value than he who leaves his 
millions with no one to perpetuate his name. One 
of the most hopeful sights earth has to give is pov- 
erty's home, lit with children's smiles; while one of 
the saddest sights of earth is the home of the prosper- 
ous, darkened by shadows known only to God and 
the poor victims themselves: homes into which the 
divine benediction which children alone carry have 
been refused. Holier in the sight of God, I believe, 
is the woman who cherishes the child of love born in 
disgrace than she who fills the chambers of her heart 
with child hatred, spiritual infanticide. Then a wel- 
come, thrice welcome to the children. 

'*For what are all our contrivings, 
And the wisdom of our books, 
When compared with their caresses, 
And the gladness of their looks ? 

They are better than all the ballads 

That ever were sung or said, 
For they are the living poems. 

And all the rest are dead.'' 



50 THE CLAIMS OF THE OHTLDREK. 

3. Having arrived, the child has a right to sym- 
pathy. How sad a sight is that of a friendless child. 
Childhood is the period of severe discipline. The 
spirit, like the body, must have many bruises and 
falls before it learns to walk. Says George Eliot : 

'* I never will believe that our youngest days are our hap- 
piest; childhood is only the happy time in contemplation 
and retrospect; to the child it is full of deep sorrows, the 
meaning of which is unknown ; witness colic and whooping- 
cough, and dread of ghosts, say nothing of hell and satan, 
and an offended deity in the sky, who was angry when I 
wanted too much plum cake; and then the sorrows of older 
persons, which children see but cannot understand, are 
worse than all." 

I ask not for indulgence or laxity, but patience ; 
the ability to enter into the child's joys and sorrows, 
Christly appreciation, the sensibility like that which 
enabled Lucy Larcom to say : 

'* And I, for one, would much rather, 
Could I merit so sweet a thing. 
Be the poet of little children 
Than the laureate of a king." 

J. The child has a right to its childhood. In these 
days in some quarters this is the right most endan- 
gered. When I see the elaborate toilets of little girls, 
so closely mimicking the mother's; the high exactions 
of little boys, their complacent bearing under circum- 



THE CLAIMS OF THE CHILDREN. 51 

stances that ought to touch and embarrass the sensitive 
man; the early rush of children into so-called ^' society 
ways;*' the formal parties, the late hours, the prema- 
ture accomplishment so desirable at thirty, so alarm- 
ing at thirteen, — I tremble lest childhood may become 
a lost art, and babes be entirely robbed of the most 
important period in their development — the pro- 
ductive, unconscious growth of earlier years. I re- 
member that John Stuart Mill, Harriet Martineau, 
and other genius-ridden souls, have had minds that 
early showed a strength that did not weaken in later 
years; but still I think it is true that the lad, who at 
twelve is passed around as a '^ little gentleman, '* with 
the society accent upon the phrase, is in danger of 
being a prig at twenty-one, and before he is thirty he 
will sneer at the enthusiasm of life, smoke a cigar, and 
sigh over the stupidity of things— the world will be- 
come to him a '^ sucked orange." The 'Mittlelady'* 
whose self-consciousness is thoroughly aroused at 
twelve, whose heart is burdened with the problems 
of drapery and social jealousy, will likely be a flirt at 
eighteen, a listless wife at twenty-five, and an un- 
happy, gossiping woman at forty. John Fiske, v/ith 
clearness and originality, has shown that the higher 
development of man and society depend upon the 
prolongation of infancy. Multiply the years of recep- 



52 THE CLAIMS OF THE CHILDREK. 

tivity, extend the period of plasticity, and you en- 
large the outcome of that life; you increase the varia- 
tions from the original type; you emphasize its indi- 
viduality. It is cruel then to desecrate the uncon- 
scious period with our hot-house process, and our 
social ambitions. 

Not long ago, riding along in a railroad car, I 
scraped an acquaintance with a little five-year-old, and 
had the little Miss on my knee. She had been visit- 
ing in Chicago, and was now returning to her home 
in a more western city. ^' What was the most inter- 
esting thing that you saw in Chicago?*' I asked. 
She confessed to not having '^ seen much'' because 
they had ^^ been invited out a great deal," but she 
had ^* been to Marshall Field's and had seen the most 
lovely dress goods; and it was very cheap, too." 
^* Would you like to live in Chicago all the time? " 
I asked. She replied, '^I suppose it would be per- 
fectly elegant to live in Chicago after one gets 
acquainted with the people. But then," she added, 
demurely, '^as the old saying is, you know there is 
no place like home." I tried to cap the quotation 
with sometliing appropriate from Emerson or Brown- 
ing, but I could think of nothing, and so I put the 
little woman down with mingled sadness and shame. 

Oh! let not the children be robbed of that child- 



THE CLAIMS OF THE CHILDREN-. 53 

hood that is necessarily a period of bashfulness and 
simplicity. Let the tender twig be put into the sun- 
light, but do not try to hasten the bud, blossom and 
fruit under artificial glass. Let it be remembered 
that the twig is not the beginning of a blazing peony, 
or even a more dignified dahlia; but it is the beginning 
of a tree. Let it grow as grows the hickory, elm 
or oak. 

5. The child has a right to a training that will en- 
able it to take care of itself . It has a right to an edu- 
cation that will help it to grapple with the stern 
necessities of life. David Dudley Field in his recent 
article in the Forum tells us that there are twelve 
thousand children under twelve years of age in 
New York city who have no homes. Seven thousand 
of them do not know where they are to sleep at night, 
and the others '' have sheltering revolting to behold. * * 

There is no remedy for this except to train these 
children so that eventually they will be competent to 
provide for themselves. Pitiable indeed is the edu- 
cation that does not teach one to think. Still more 
radical are the defects of the system that does not 
teach one to work, increase one's external resources, 
add to his power of dealing with things. The child 
has a right to an educated hand, a trained eye. The 
time is coming when parents will be held responsible 



54 THE CLAIMS OF THE CHILDREN. 

of grave misdemeanor when they turn a son or daugh- 
ter out into the world with no aptitudes for a liveli- 
hood. The boy who cannot build a fire, saw a board, 
drive a nail or harness ahorse, is uneducated, foolish, 
although he may read seven languages and be able to 
trace all the constellations. The girl is uncultured, 
unfitted for life, who cannot make a loaf of bread, fit 
a garment, or darn a stocking, even though she be an 
adept in French, and an expert on the piano. The 
woman gives a dishonest hand at the marriage altar 
if it, co-operating with the head, cannot earn for her 
a living should it become necessary. This is why the 
kindergarten, manual-training schools, and all the 
technical discipline of the new education are in line 
with the rights of children, and represent the claims 
of the child. 

6. The child has a right to a moral training. 
Professor Seeley has been giving us some statistics 
recently far more alarming than those of illiteracy. 
He shows that the ratios of insanity and idiocy in 
this country have been steadily increasing, as have 
also those of the deaf mute and the blind. In 1850 
we had one insane to every 1,468 persons; in 1880 
one to every 656, and the other figures are about in 
the same proportion. Allowing for a great difference 
in the skill and thoroughness of the census-takers^ 



THE CLAIMS OF THE CHILDREN. 55 

there yet remains enough to prove that the moral na- 
ture has not kept pace with the material advance- 
ment of our country; the heart has not kept balanced 
with the head; the will has not been developed 
sufficiently to stand the added strain placed upon it. 

Yesterday the call in education was for a scientific 
training, a study of things rather than of words. 
To-day it is for manual training, disciplined nerves 
and skilled muscle to serve an intelligent brain. To- 
morrow it will be for ethical training, a systematic 
enforcement of the law of Right, a study of the 
science of Duty. We are about to recognize in our 
educational systems that neither truth nor beauty can 
be successfully discovered by the bad. That child 
alone is prepared to live whose life is grounded in 
integrity ; who aims at that which is excellent, rather 
than that which is easy ; to whom justice means more 
than success, and who rates character above popu- 
larity. 

7. The child has a right to a religious culture. 
Morality in its highest development is possible only 
under the sanctions and inspirations of religion. 
Practical ethics must be rooted in ideal ethics. The 
adjustment of the parts is possible only when the soul 
is haunted with a sense of the harmonious whole. 
The child claims at our hands not only religious 



56 THE CLAIMS OF THE CHILDEBiq". 

training but something infinitely more important — 
religious influences. To borrow a phrase from Miss 
Cobb the child has a right ^* to be presented to the 
objects it is made to love and reverence." 
To recapitulate, the claims of a child are: 

1. To be well born. 

2. To a welcome into the world. 

3. To the sympathy of its elders. 

4. To a long childhood. 

5. To a practical education. 

6. To a moral training. 

7. To religious influences; spiritual aptitude; an appetite 
for heavenly things ; a thirst for perfection. 

Now, what are we going to do about this? Let us 
begin by confessing the claims. Margaret Fuller 
Ossoli wrote in her diary after the birth of her child: 
^^ I am the mother of an immortal being. Oh! God, 
be merciful unto me, a sinner.** Let this confession 
and this aspiration sink deep into the heart of father 
and mother. The child has claims which neither one 
can meet alone. There are more half-orphans in the 
world than the death record shows: children of 
fathers who delegate all the parental responsibility to 
the mothers, while they make money or attend poli- 
tics : mothers who place their babes to the borrowed 
breasts of servants. 

The united resources of the home must be concen- 
trated upon the destinies of the child, and even this 



THE CLAIMS OF THE CHILDKEN. 57 

is not enough. The father cannot superintend the 
details of the text-book, nor the mother assume all 
the functions of a teacher. So the State wisely 
comes in with its public schools. This country pays 
one hundred million dollars annually to school- 
teachers alone. But the State is made up of indi- 
viduals who hold widely different views concerning 
the deepest verities of life. The most permanent 
forces of the soul are the religious forces. As things 
now are, all will admit that our homes do not, and 
the public schools must not, undertake adequately to 
develop the religious powers of the child. One does 
not, the other must not, give the child some working 
thoughts upon the ever-pressing problems of soul, 
represented by the words God, Soul, Death, Immor- 
tality, Heaven, Hell, Prayer. Still more true is it 
that neither the home nor the school bring the child 
under the influences of these forces, although they 
represent realities more profound than any intellect- 
ual conception can be. Thus it is that the child is 
landed at the church door. The plainest and sim- 
plest common sense, the severest utilitarian logic, 
brings the child to the public altar of religion and 
humbly asks the cooperation of some fraternity of 
souls, some church, to help nurture it into a tender 
and devout manhood or womanhood. 



58 THE CLAIMS OF THE CHILDREN. 

^ ^ Let the children first be filled. ' ' To heed this re- 
quest seems to me to be the prime mission of the 
church. I have spoken of the fate for good or ill 
that lies back of birth. Perhaps there is more dan- 
ger in this presence of losing sight of the other 
truth, namely : the tremendous power of the meas- 
ureless forces that shape the human soul after birth. 
The brain of the child and that of the baby chimpan- 
zee are strikingly alike at birth ; there is an immense 
difference between the adult brain of the lowest man 
and that of the highest ape. The surface of the lat- 
ter remains, in the main, smooth, unimpressed, while 
the former is creased and corrugated by countless im- 
pressions received during life, all of which affect, 
modify and multiply the power of soul. I have 
spoken of the persistency of the cuckoo song. Let 
it be balanced with the testimony of Francis Galton, 
who says that ^^deaf mutes who are first taught to 
communicate freely with others, after they have 
passed the period of boyhood, say that the meaning 
of the church service which they have attended, ac- 
companied with their parents, knelt in prayer and 
studied the whole spectacular side of worship, has 
been utteily unintelligible to them; the ritual has 
touched no inherited chord in their nature ; that it 
might move, however dumbly, the religious nature/' 



THE CLAIMS OF THE CHILDREN. 59 

Is not this an awful warning to the indifferent parent 
who, in the name of liberality, allows his children to 
grow up untouched by any religious views, either at 
home or at church, into an apathy of soul, an ab- 
sence of reverence, like unto that of the deaf mute 
our scientist speaks of? 

Archbishop Hughes of the Catholic Church spoke 
like a scientist when he said, '^ Give me the children 
until they are twelve years old, and I care not what 
you do with them after that.'* May I not state the 
truth from the other side? The child that is allowed 
to grow up in an indifferent, undevout, non-worship- 
ful atmosphere until he is fifteen will be maimed 
religiously for life. He will have been deprived per- 
manently of some of the most blessed memories, 
abiding safeguards and tender influences that life pos- 
sesses. I had rather be the son of an Indian chief, 
born in a wigwam, fettered at birth with the inherit- 
ance of barbaric ancestory, and then be allowed from 
the birth*moment to grow up in a home of real refine- 
ment and true religion — than to be born in Cam- 
bridge, a son of a Harvard Professor, with the best 
blood of puritan New England in my veins and to 
be doomed at birth to the life of the wigwam and 
the influence of the plain. 

May God help the church to become a molding 



60 THE CLAIMS OF THE CHILDREJ^. 

power over adult lives ; but let us ever remember that 
this will be very small compared with the influence 
for good that it may throw around the souls of chil- 
dren. Not what a church teaches or the social pleas- 
ure it gives determines its power — though these are 
important — but that totality of influences, the power 
of habit, the joy of co-operation, the delights of 
fellowship, the contagion of earnestness, the power 
of example, the weight of character, the awe of 
worship — these are the tremendous forces that has 
lent sublime potency to the crudest conventicle and 
makes deathless the power of any and every church. 
I know the defects of the churches, how imperfect 
they all are, and yet the child pleads with you for 
those helps which churches alone do give. Its helps 
cannot be catalogued. It is now a thought, oftener 
an emotion, now the emphatic pronunciation of the 
word *'duty,'* and again the reverent utterance of 
the word ''God" in such a way as to rebuke the 
profanity of the street and the flippancy of the play- 
ground. Give to the child these helps, honor this 
claim in highest fashion, and you dare not ignore all 
the other claims spoken of. *' Let the children first 
be filled, for it is not meet to take the children's 
bread and cast it to the dogs." 



ESSAYS OF JAMES VILA BLAKE. 

Subjects: — Choice, Faculty, Public Education, Happiness and Time, 
Vaing-lory, Luck, Seeing Good Things, Side Lights of Intelligence, Indi- 
viduality, Questions of Heroism, Praising, Censure, Flattery, Government, 
Handwriting, Knowledge, Meditation, Common Sense, Requital, Anger, 
Judgment of Others, Patience, Enemies, Immortal Life, Death, Emergency, 
Conscience Character as a Work, Superiority. 

The volume of this [gnomic] wisdom is properly the world's Bible, and 
every sentence, every fragment of it is precious beyond price. Mr. Blake 
has given us in this little book the condensed result of the thought of his 
bestnours — hours spent, and a great many of them, in study, reflection, 
observation, calm, careful meditation upon the great problems of life and 
of being. The fruit is a rare work of wisdom; a neat volume full to the 
brim of enrichment, suggestion, stimulus; a very encheiridion, a vade- 
mecum to carry amid all passages, the varied experiences and exposures of 
our earthly life. Every one will find something here to feed upon, pemmi- 
can to carry for the waste aud solitary places in his journey — song of con- 
quest, notes of the battle cry for successful conflict and victory. — Charles 
D. B. Mills in U?iity. 

The essays of Mr. Blake will surprise and delight all lovers of good 
English prose. He has made a contribution of lasting value to our litera- 
ture in a form so condensed and so original as to inevitably attract and hold 
the attention ot thoughtful readers. One is reminded not only by the 
brevity of these essays, but by the cast and mould of the sentences, and the 
plain, fine, discriminating language, of Bacon's condensed wit and sense. 
The quaint, clear English, like that which has come down to us from other 
days, is, however, the only thing in the book that is not modern. This 
writer reflects the culture of to-day. He respects individuality; he is 
humane; he is not afraid of the truth; he believes in the future, and that 
justice and mercy must prevail. — Chicago Tribune, 

' The quality of these essays which impresses us throughout is one for 
which we can find no better word than charm. There is something in their 
manner which is pleasing and delightful to a very high degree. Their 
quaintness, their archaic simplicity of manner and turn of phrase, have 
much to do with this. Very likely a critic here and there will say that the 
style is artificial and affected, but if the impeachment cannot be denied, it is 
certain that the artificialityis agreeable, and the affectation v/onderfuliy 
pleasant. We do not imagine that Mr. Blake has chosen any of the great 
essayists for a model. But it is evident that, like all the essayists, he is a 
lover of his kind, that he has read them carefully and lovingly, and some of 
the colors frovu their palettes have been floated off upon his own. Perhaps 
it is Bacon more than any other who is subtly echoed here and there. But 
Mr. Blake is a lover of them all, and quotes from them with generous ad- 
miration. Nor has he hesitated, in two or three instances, to revert to sub- 
jects which the genius of Bacon has already touched and beautified— praise, 
anger, death, vainglory. It would be a daring- thing to say that Mr. Blake's 
essays on these subjects are much better than those of "the wisest, brightest, 
m.eanest of mankind," but " a consensus of the competent " would probably 
assign to them a greater value relatively to the needs and problems of the 
present time.— T>%^ Index, 

1 volume, 216 pages, including full Index. Cloth, 
dark-red polished top, uneut edges. Price $1.00. 

For sale by the trade, or mailed on receipt of price by the publishers. 
CHARLES H. KERR & CO., 175 Dearborn street, Chicago. 



A STUDY OF 

PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY. 

BY LEWIS G. JANES. 

Revised Edition. 3ig Pages ^8vo, Clothe Gilt top. Price, %j.jo. 

Treats of the natural evolution of the Christian Religion, according to 
the historical method; ap}3l}ing the assured results of modern criticism to 
the question of the historical verity of Jesus, the investigation of his life 
and teaching, and the development of organized Christianity. 

EXTRACTS FROM PRESS NOTICES: 

*'A thorough book, a just book, and a practical book, — that is what Dr. 
Janes has given us. * * He has shown remarkable discrimination in 
what he has brought into his three hundred pages, and in what he has left 
out. There is nothing cumbrous, superfluous, or half explained, while a 
good power of compression, good imagination, quick insight into corre- 
spondences and a firm and proportionate grasp of the subject as a whole, 
have made possible the introduction of a remarkably large number of top- 
ics. * * We think of no other simple and popular work so well calcu- 
lated to perform the service for which this is intended, and we trust it will 
have a large circulation." — Unitarian Reviezv, 

"Dr. Janes is evidently a thorough scholar, and one cannot fail to be 
impressed with the care, the honesty, the faithfulness, the impartiality, the 
love of truth, the conservatism exhibited throug^hout this admirable volume. 
* * We commend the book, not only to Unitarians, but to all who are 
willing to trace, or to see traced in a masterly manner, the operation of 
natural causes, of race, politics, and social conditions generally, upon tlie 
rise and progress of Christianity." — Popular Science Mo7ithly. 

" The temper and spirit of the book are so refined, so earnest, and so fair 
to all opponents, that it must impress those who are impelled to disagree 
with its most prominent conclusions as a model of polite and generous con- 
troversial literature." — Brooklyn Union. 

"A valuable summary on a great subject. * * Evidently Dr. Janes 
has studied long and carefully. What is more, he judges and reports with 
such balanced judgment that his word weighs whether it weighs for or 
against one*s own opinion." — W. C. G. in Unity. 

"As regards its contents in general, it is sound, thorough, accurate, 
reliable." — Religio-P hilosojphical 'journal. 

" Calm, free from bias, intelligent, discriminating, just. * * Mr. 
Janes has, in our opinion, done his work of elucidation remarkably well. 
He has put us all under a deep debt to him by his admirable presenta'tion in 
one small volume of the result of years of careful study. "--7Vi;<? Index. 

"An exceedingly creditable venture. * * The unpretentious and lucid 
simplicity of style, the fullness of information, and the evident conscien- 
tiousness and painstaking for thoroughness of exposition, which is the S])e- 
cial distinction of the book from the beginning to its close, * * entitle 
this work to high praise, and render it, for popular use, and especially for 
Sundajr-school teaching of the liberal sort, one of the best manuals <rf its 
kind with which we are acquainted," — Christian Register. 
*For sale by the trade, or mailed on receipt of price by the publishers, 
CHARLES H. KERR St CO., 175 Dearborn street, Chicago. 



BROWNING'S WOMEN. 

BY MARY E. BURT. 
With an Introduction by Edward E. Hale, D.D., LL.D. 



A patient and loving study of some of Browning's char- 
acters is given to the world in this gracefully written volume, 
and it will doubtless add interest and life to the reading of the 
poet's works, and help readers to a clearer understanding of 
some obscure points in them. ♦ * ♦ Miss Burt Avill win 
many admirers by her style, which is very graceful and clear- 
* * * It is not too much to say that every lover of Brown- 
ing will wish for, if he does not possess, a copy of this new and 
dainty volume before the year is over. — Chicago Tribune. 

The study of Browning has been with Miss Burt a genuine 
enthusiasm, and of all efforts that have been made to make 
Browning intelligible to the ordinary mind, this seems to us 
by far the most successful. * * * Every Browning club 
would do well to make this book a text book, and every 
student of Browning should well and carefully digest its con- 
tents. — Saturday Evening Herald. 

Into the preparation of this book the writer has put much 
loving care. The work is conscientious throughout. It has a 
personal flavor, which in a book of this kind is an advantage. 
This is not the commonplace of class-room instruction, but an 
informal discussion of characters concerning whom opinions 
may sometimes differ, but in whom the interest never fails. 
Still the analysis of characters is generally just, and the posi- 
tion taken has always been carefully considered. The book 
will win its own way with all who read or want to read the 
poet. — Unity. 

Cloth, i6mo., gilt top, 236 pages. Price, $1.00. 

For sale by the trade, or mailed on receipt of price by the publishers, 
CHARLES H. KERR & CO., 175 Dearborn street, Chicago. 



UNITY CLUBS. 



The " Unity Club '* is a Western institution, still in its infancy but rapid- 
ly growing. Historically, its origin has been connected with the Liberal 
Christian churches in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois and other neighbor- 
ing states, but logically the name implies merely the purpose of uniting" 
effort in reading, study, and interchange of thought, and this united effort 
may be made equally well by those of different churches or no church, though 
practically it will be found that such clubs can be most readily formed by 
a group of personal acquaintances such as would naturally be found in a 
common church. 

Members of this growing circle of clubs have prepared for each other's 
use a series of pamphlets as giaides in the study of favorite subjects. Intro- 
ductory to the rest is one entitled -r j t^j t 'T^t 7 /"^ T T T T3 C* 
or Mutual Improvement Societies vJ l\l 1 1 JL K^L^VJ OO. 
in Town and Church, by Emma Endicott Marean. This leaflet contains 
in small compass many practical hints for the guidance of those desiring to 
form new clubs. A succinct list of "Ten Commandments" for literary cir- 
cles is a valuable feature. 

It contains also a descriptive list of our other leaflets for clubs, the titles 
of which may be summarized : Outline Studies in Lowell, ioc. ; in Holmes, 
Bryant and Whittier, ioc; in George Eliot, ioc; in Robert 
Browning's Poetry, 25c. ; in Politics, ioc ; Ten Great Novels, a guide 
to English fiction, ioc; The Masque of the Year, ioc; The Legend 
OF Hamlet, giving side-light for Shakespeare students, 25c New leaflets 
will be issued from time to time as demand arises. 

Price OF "Unity Clubs," post-paid, 10 cents. 

CHARLES H. KERR & CO., Publishers, 

175 Der^rborn St., Chicago. 



